Profile Information

Hello, my name is Steve Floyd. Since day one, I've been a self motivated entrepreneur. It hasn't always been easy, but it's definitely been interesting. Between being awesome, I design and develop interactive marketing solutions for medium to large sized businesses.
I have a web consulting business called AXZM based in Dallas, TX that provides affordable Interactive Design, Web Development and SEO / SEM services.

Blog Comments & Posts

I would concur with Ronell, mad that I didn't put this together first! Awesome job Isla, you nailed the process / steps a brand needs to take to tell their story in a way that also aligns with their users / audience needs and business goals - something few people recommending brand story telling are doing effectively in my belief.

I think people assume that we (practitioners) don't struggle with the same pitfalls of the brands we consult with, but in reality we have many of the same problems. We worry. We sometimes can't see the forest through the trees. We don't always have it figured out. They (businesses) often don't want to hear "It is a process that takes time, research and commitment" but it's the truth.

Getting a company to assess and identify their core values (not who they SAY they are, but who they REALLY are as a company) is one of the most important steps, and also the biggest misstep I see in the entire process.

The sad reality is, the average business owner / stakeholder cannot be honest with themselves (aside from the typical politics and gatekeeping) and this is where their brand story becomes unravelled at the seams. Their audience / customers know the truth and you can almost predict the outcome each and every time.

Start with WHY and the rest will follow. For those who just can't seem to figure that out, well... they should start with your template (or mine) and they might just get there.

I rarely post comments, but this was really great info Annie. If you learned to code front end and work with more JS libraries, you would hurt some feelings for sure. Thanks for putting this together, bummed I missed Mozcon this year.

Mike mashing out another banger as usual! There are a ton of metrics you can dig up to show demand but tying those to a tangible dollar amount for stakeholders / decision makers is something we are all going to have to do if we expect to get content buy-in.

I would add that people working with Enterprise content look into the product Colleen Jones has been working on "Content WRX" - http://www.contentwrx.com/

If Google was a government, it would be pre cold war Russia or in the early years of the Chinese communist party. They are taking a position more and more that everyone is guilty, which is sad because a massive portion of webmasters and small business owners out there do not have the technical knowledge, time and / or resources to rectify these penalties.

If Google really valued their audience, they would embrace the SEO community and empower us with the tools to help people, not hinder us with inaccurate documentation, double speak and a mountain of misinformation at every turn. Aaron Wall and countless other SEOs have been saying it for years - this command and control strategy only benefits Google's bottom line.

The harder it is to rank, the more people are forced into AdWords and the more money Google makes. it's been proven again and again - which is fine. They are in the business of making money, but don't present this culture of transparency and "don't be evil" if your practices are anything but.

Great job guys! I love the new layout and interface, extra crispy for sure. I've been telling people to Stop Selling SEO (purely) for the last few years, and it looks like even the most prominent SEOs are dropping the focus on just SEO as well.

Good stuff Mackenzie! The 80/20 rule sounds great in theory, but I can't tell you how many times I've had to defend the idea of sharing / blogging other things (outside of the services they offer) to clients. It's like pulling teeth. Once they get it, it's smooth sailing, but getting there can be tough.

Generally speaking, putting the user first results in win. Again, great post Mackenzie!

Math(s), statistics, predictive analytics, bayesian analytics and data modeling is the future of business and it's been headed that way for the last 20 years. if you were not good at math and abstract equations in school, you are going to hate the direction business is headed in the next 20.

Great post Will, now I just need to figure out what you actually said...

Great article Gianluca! I completely agree with your publisher hypothesis. People and brands (brands as publishers remember guys?) are slowly replacing links. Yes, link popularity will always have some level of influence, but the role of backlinks will be subjugated to another layer of validation, not the end all be all that it has been in the past.

Social media shares will obviously be another critical factor, equal if not more dominate than just links alone (depending on where the link is from of course). I see a lot more diversity going on in our future and it has a lot less to do with links and a whole lot more to do with people, that's the bottom line.

I agree 100% with everything going on in this post. Way too many people are optimizing for search engines and not people. This approach is lowering the value of our industry as a whole and a big part of the reason we have problems getting the budgets we deserve compared to the PR / Advertising people. It is seen as a tactical utility of the marketing mix, rather than the customer-centric practice it can (and eventually will) be.

We could be leading the content strategy and communication goals for the whole show, but we get pegged as bottom feeders - or as Wil said in his keynote at Mozcon "The Ugly Fish of Marketing". It's the opportunistic / competitive mindset that has gotten us this far, but is now a big part of what is holding us back.